The New World

It’s been nagging at me for a little while like an uneasy feeling you can’t quite grasp. The realization just hit me that my kinky life is my life.

I’ve always considered the spanking scene a sort of alternate reality that I’m involved in. A place a bit to the side and a touch out of time with the vanilla world I normally travel in. I get up in the morning and go to work. I deal with family issues and professional ones. I pay my bills and my taxes and generally do all the things I’m supposed to do. I belong to different communities especially online where much of our networking seems to be done these days. There are social networks and professional networks — each with a profile and little excerpts about our lives that we don’t mind others reading about.

Recently, I was asked to join Facebook as a way to connect with family and friends. Unlike my presence on Fetlife, the Facebook page would be vanilla, the version of me that walks down he street and buys gum or goes to the bank. First of all, it seemed odd to put my real name on anything online — normally, I use nicknames that are not attached to my real one. I filled out all the spaces on the forms and created an account, ready to fill in some facts and remarks for the profile. I started writing it and just had to stop because I was asking myself, “Who the hell is this person?” Just like the professional page I have up on LinkedIn, I stared at the information in front of me and realized that it was a facade. It was a stunning moment for me to realize that I now consider my kinky life more “real” than I do the vanilla one.

I don’t like an overabundance of artifice although I put up my own fronts when needed (i.e. the Radagast persona that writes this blog). However, even though I do use a nom de plume, the thoughts I spew onto this space are mine and often quite unfiltered even if somewhat edited for content. This person is me and probably the closest to the real me that people would be able to see. My life in the outside world is now fake to me — it is the alternate reality that is somewhat out of step with who I am. Especially at work and in my professional networks, the fakeness of it all is hip-deep. I cannot be myself or say what I mean or admit to anything without fear of revealing too much. I can’t talk about my job in anything but glowing terms even if my feelings are the opposite. Every bit of it is lies or half-truths. The vanilla world is one where lies are seen as preferable and it honestly makes me feel disgusted.

So, there you have it. I dutifully fill in the boxes with useless and rubbish information because that’s what is expected of me. I don’t say too much, reveal too much and pretend that every day is sunny and generic. The truth is that I’m no longer a vanilla person dabbling in the kinky, I’m a kinky person that increasingly feels no connection to the vanilla.

10 Responses to “The New World”

I think that this train of thought may have taken you a bit past your home stop ;-). If you owned a club or website or movie studio, THEN you’d primarily be this kinky person with a minimal connection to the vanilla. You aren’t disciplining your co-workers or the otherwise deserving in real life – like the rest of the world, you’re on the “neutral territory” of the public and work places.

I don’t have a desire to physically discipline my coworkers (nor do I have a desire to touch them at all) but I’m certainly no shrinking violet either when it comes to speaking up. As a matter of fact, I recently told one coworker exactly what I thought of his work habits and his behavior towards another coworker which displeased me to no end.

As to my original thesis — it stands. I can’t change the way I feel about anything whether outside observers agree with me or not.

Unlike your buddy MVee, I truly found this blog today to be rather profound. I agree, too. (surprised?)

In the past few years..and especially in these past few months, my vanilla life is pretty much something that just happens between spankings…play, plans to play, parties, and Fetlife networking. Honesty is at the absolute core of it. I think that is elementally why we are all so comfortable with our kinky lives.

How often in vanilla land can you BE 100% honest..even though it is expected. Bullshitting your way throughout the day is de rigueur. I sometimes have to really REMIND myself that my kink is something I am ‘supposed’ to hide. I let things slip occasionallyand you know what? It’s never that big of a deal to anyone. Really good thoughts today “Radagast”..whoever you are! 😉

What I was trying to say was that I feel an unease in the vanilla world because of the need to put up my guard nearly all the time. I suppose it’s a by-product of being able to be so free and open in the kinky world that, for me, it’s hard going back.

@ MVee: IMHO Identification with a culture and percentage of time spent per day in a culture often have little connection to each other. Try spending a few weeks in a very different culture and see what happens. Try talking to someone deeply involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism, or someone who is involved in a consuming but non-mainstream religious practice.

I believe it is cultural (subcultural) identification we are talking about here. I don’t care much for the way the “mainstream” society contructs it’s institutions or relationships, so I have found a couple of other subcultures that match my values and way of being much better. I still have to make my living on the “Mainland” for now–that does not alter my chosen cultural identification one bit.

I agree with you Rad, Lisa and Wednesday. I nearly freaked out filling out Facebook and never have completed it. Yes, I still do vanilla work and have have a few vanilla friends. But all the close ones are ones I made before I got involved in the scene.

I haven’t made a close non-scene friend in over 13 years.

This is kind of depressing. And yet, last summer when the second of my two close vanilla friends moved away, part of what I felt was relief that I didn’t need to worry about her dropping by when I was wearing a school uniform.

The downside, and there is a downside, is that despite being introverted, I’m sometimes quite lonely now for human contact. My closest girl friend in the scene lives 6000 miles away and neither of us is great about writing maybe partly because what I want isn’t writing. I miss having a friend I can go out for coffee with and sit and chat a couple times a month. And no, we probably wouldn’t talk about kinky stuff. But we could. I wouldn’t have to guard my tongue, worry about saying too much, always be the listener.

Sorry this is so long. Clearly I may need my own blog entry for this topic.

Mija: The vanilla relationship that I had before meeting Sandy did its part in making sure I had no friends left from that era. The person I was with just did not like to socialize at all so one by one, what friends I had drifted away.

I can honestly say that the friends that I have now, people like you who live all over the country, are the largest number of people I’ve considered friends at any single time in my life. Because of the shared connection to the scene, I feel much closer to the people I know now than any people I’ve ever known.

its great when people “get” you ..and that’s found in a really high percentage in this community. I have nothing against vanilla people. I just get bored easily.
I remember experimenting with Match.com last year. ONE actual date was the result. I wanted to see if two people could find all kinds of interesting things to chat about over dinner. Largely, no. Because I didn’t feel free to talk about my kink..which makes up a great deal of being self-expressive…I was highly understimulated. I don’t know much about sports or politics. So needless to say, Match.com was a waste of my money.

I can actually relate to that. I’ve been lucky in that I recently “came out” to my one close vanilla friend over here, and she was positive, supportive, interested, amused, not at all shocked, and shared her own limited explorations in that arena. Nothing has changed outwardly in our friendship, we don’t sit around talking about kinky stuff, but a little band around my heart loosened a little, and we’re just closer. This is because I don’t have to be so guarded. I hate, hate, hate lying to a friend, even a tiny little white vanilla lie about where I’m going for a weekend. Unfortunately, it’s usually necessary.

I’ve just come back from a mostly (but not entirely, fortunately) vanilla combination work/vacation trip to the west coast. I made contact with a lot of vanilla friends I haven’t seen in a couple years, and it was of course great to see them. It was less great not to be able to explain that I can’t just fly out to SF for the weekend, because I travel too much for spanking parties… I moved around quite a bit during my education, so I have good vanilla friends all over the place. Most of them know and are fine with it, even supportive, and some are even quite curious. But it’s not the same as talking to people who really understand, even if our kinks don’t exactly overlap. Maybe because I’ve only really been in this world for a year, I still feel quite schizophrenic– the people who have known me the longest are not a part of my new secret life, so, for the most part, I share different parts of my life with vanilla and kinky friends.